essay
Being nobody: Alice Oswald’s Nobody and the poetics of (non)being
The book opens with an introductory passage that is not really an introduction, more a kind of acknowledgement of preceding stories, of actors and actions from The Odyssey, and perhaps the Oresteia, along with their two central characters Odysseus and Agamemnon, their two illustrious authors, Aeschylus and Homer, and one figure so insignificant in the tale as to warrant no name: The poet.
The three short paragraphs are situated somewhere outside of the poem proper, spoken by an authority that will not speak to us directly again. And then on the next page a quote from The Odyssey, not really an epigram, more like an acknowledge of genetic inheritance. The poem opens before it begins, like being born into an ancient human community. Poems and people have no single beginning. The Oresteia takes place within the scope of the Odyssey. The Odyssey’s beginning is unwritten.
The book takes place between these two ports. Between foundational texts.
Because our book is to situate itself as other, the space between, a going between, a nothing written by a nobody.
The poem, like the poet, exists in a realm between, a stony island between renowned destinations.
The poem lives in the murkiness between those stories.[1]
We learn something here about how to read this book. Don’t expect full disclosure, the ocean is murky, we cannot see the bottom. The poem, like the poet and the reader, is alive. Its life is something “between.”
One must be careful what one says about such a book. I should not overstep what I think I know about the poem. What is written I can read. What is meant I can try to understand, the way one tries to understand another person. If it is a living thing then as such it is, and remains, other. It flashes and hides like a fish in water. What we know of the other is what we glimpse. The same is true of the self.
Also there was a poet there.[2]
begins the second page, quoted from Homer. Homer, and, of course, not Homer (or not-Homer). A translation, and a fragment. And it is such an unheroic clause to start with. That “also” alerting us to the fact of our contingency. This book’s contingency. Our own. The repetition of “there” as the place the poet is between is apparently significant, because “there” occurs throughout the book: a vague deixis that is precisely unknowable. This “there” remains fastidiously opaque. It offers us an object lesson not just in how to read this book, but how to understand our relational self. Where the poem is, where the poet is, where we are, is over there, being between theres.
This being-there mirrors Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, literally there-being, this thrownness of being that ex-ists already in its taking place towards. The self is manifested and aware of itself only in this act of thrownness, of being on the way to there. As Oswald has stated already, this poem is always between.
Heidegger’s word enacts Hegel’s dialectical self which comes into being only and always in its relation to otherness. “There” is the otherness that constitutes our being. At the centre of everybody, constituting our presence, is the absence of elsewhere.
I wish I was there or there[3]
And later in the book
tangles me lower I wish I was
there or
there[4]
I take this to be both a nostalgia for origins, wishing for once to be a whole self, outside of the endless (and beginningless) necessary series of relations that constitute being, wishing to be somehow somewhere (“here”), and simultaneously an acknowledgement of the erotic nature of being, of the always yearning wish towards the other that leads the living into acts both of the body and the imagination. We wish to arrive, and that is how we know we are alive. It is us wishing that is our living consciousness.
If living is an endless series of relations with otherness, then surely this must be exhausting at times, and there is an instant that seems to be sympathetic for the exhausted traveller:
you must be so so
footsore after your ten-year war you surely
deserve a little something if you
take off your shoes the bare floor will be so cold so
filthily infectious you should step down safely
here[5]
So Odysseus is pitied, exhausted by an endless ongoingness (as are we all), he must yearn for a here instead of a there, a static home. But we know from the Odyssey that this is really Calypso speaking, seducing him to a dream of eternal life on an island paradise, a stasis that is really death.
Like Heidegger (and Hegel), Oswald places her thinking within the drama of Greek thought.
*
Like the self, the sea has no beginning or end, just these moments of now: a betweenness:
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings[6]
The absent punctuation performs a kind of dual function, drawing attention to our own familiarity with phrases, well-trodden language that offers a certain structure of knowledge in how we speak and question the world, such that the missing question mark after “start” is both absent and present. The lack of a full stop (a period) mimics the meaning of the phrase, there is no ending, so that we see grammar and semantics are identical, and so is absence and presence. The “it” refers to the sea, but also to the life of the person viewing the sea, and to this poem as well (and all poems). Understanding the endlessness of the sea, which we do every time we encounter it, is a clue, a mirror to the endlessness of ourselves.[7]
The fact that the line is repeated 25 pages later only confirms the endlessness and beginninglessness of every line and poem. And the occasion becomes choral rather than individual. What the self says has been said and will be said again, this is part of the magic of a poem. Intimate individual experience becomes communal.
The prosody suggests both an acceptance of semantic convention and a move beyond grammatical confines. Its innovations put it in line with Modernist and post-modernist adventures, and indeed the text sees itself as inheriting values, registers and tonalities from Ancient and Modern sources.
Consider these lines of Oswald’s:
Then went down to the sea…
and set up mast and sails…[8]
Compared to the opening line of Pound’s Cantos:
And then went down to the ship/set keel to breakers…[9]
Opening a line with “and” and choosing “set” as the nautical act seems too reminiscent to be accidental. In his afterword for Ronald Johnson’s Radios (an erasure of Milton’s Paradise Lost), Guy Davenport makes a compelling argument for Pound’s line being a sonic equivalence to the opening lines of the Odyssey, so in this regard Oswald’s line is an echo of an echo of Homer, and sets itself as a generic inheritor of both.
We encounter over a hundred compound words, hyphenated neologisms that are reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon kennings, and perhaps due to the subject matter and to the ghost of Pound, of The Wanderer (which Pound so brilliantly translated) in particular. Sea-film, eye-metal, sky-lid, ghost-grace, thought-storms, manage to be both ancient sounding and contemporary, the hyphen somehow bridging centuries, and producing new molecules the way that poet-alchemists always have.
Her diction throughout is a swell of latinate multi-syllabics punctured by Anglo-Saxon monosyllabics, which give the effect of both classical leanings with the invading hordes of guttural sounds ready to break them down to ruins. The whole effect is as if each line (and the line is the constituent grammar of this long poem, each line like another wave breaking onto the beach) is itself a fragment of a ruined whole, a brilliant remnant of flotsam and jetsam that crashes into view and is quickly drawn back into the murky past ready to reemerge again in the future.
Classical allusions and even immemorial landscapes are catapulted into the contemporary setting with the littering pollution of polystyrene (styrofoam), ashtray, light-switches and tissue (Kleenex). In this way, the ancient and the everyday are shown to co-exist in one reality, with the modern addition often shocking us with its new intrusive and indelible presence (think microbeads!).
In a similar way, Oswald uses just enough extraordinarily precise physical descriptions to prevent the whole book from disappearing into an ethereal realm disconnected from our living life. “Vaporous poems…hang in the chills above rivers”[10] and later “seals breathe…the sea’s bad breath.” The same seals that later “bob about like footballs,”[11] which is wonderfully true, bobbing along as a line itself, with all those consonantal b’s and alliterative o’s, almost-ugly silly but accurate and leaving one with the very clear sense of a switched-on observational presence, looking without sentimentality at a living sea.
a blue came over us a blue cloud
Whose brown shadow goose-fleshed the sea[12]
Such precision (blue and brown oppose each other on the colour circle, so a blue cloud would cast a brown shadow) and the uncanny way a shadowed sea is suddenly cooled giving you/the sea goose-bumps. The self is out in the elements here, and one feels when reading such a description that it is not with one’s intellect one agrees with it, but with one’s body first, as she herself describes later on:
it felt so right to feel her thoughts
hitting her skull[13]
At times like this, one is aware how writing and reading are simultaneously of the mind and the body, dualism is confounded, borders between selves disappear, goose-flesh is the sea and the swimmer.
*
Half-heard literary echoes jump between the Classical to the Modern.
There are echoes of Dante’s Paradiso in various images, such as “the microscopic insects in the eye” on page 29, and much of Ovid including one stunning metamorphosis:
and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water
a morsel of ice a glamour of oil
and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal
and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings…
he snapped himself into sticks and burst into leaves
which fell back down again in water…
and blinked himself into thousands of self-seeing eyes…
an Ovidian description of Proteus if ever there was one (though the anaphora of and feels much more Anglo-Saxon). Indeed, due to the protean nature of this text one might expect more echoes of Ovid, and Proteus surfaces and resurfaces (along with Tereus, Procne and Philomena, Daedalus and Icarus among other ghosts) on page 39, where
an old sea-god sometimes surfaces
describes exactly what the mythical quasi-reference is doing, surfacing, so we are reminded again to consider Proteus not only as a god of the ever-shifting ocean, but a model for the sea of Oswald’s language as well. Proteus might be another god of poetry. And Orpheus appears, perhaps, making an oblique appearance on page 50 where
…once a fisherman poking among the mackerel
pulled out a human head whose head
tell me muse about this floating nobody
The link between Orpheus, whose head was cast into the Hebron (subject of an earlier Oswald work) and floated, singing, to Lesbos where the song of poetry passed on through Sappho, and the book’s title, is made overt. The myth of the ur-poet is of a decapitated god whose poems continue to sing after the death of his body, the way poems continue after every poet’s death, and here we see that each poem is a no-body, a song carried along the Hebron to the next island where a poet (or perhaps just a reader) takes it on. A decapitated head has no body, a poet is nobody[14].
*
Nobody is a self-consciously formal work, an experiment whose openendedness draws important parallels between poetic form and metaphors of being.
In an earlier work, A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Oswald is insistent that
This is not a play. This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn estuary[15].
When one first encounters the “poem” it is indeed as a “play,” or a play on play that one at first understands its presentation. In some way it is reminiscent of Under Milk Wood, and the idea of sleepwalkers, and the Severn’s proximity to his (fictional!) Welsh village might support comparison. Thomas’s is a “play” that grew out of poetic sketches, such as Quite Early One Morning. But maybe A sleepwalk has more in common with the Modernist “play” of Eliot in his multi-vocal epic The Waste Land.
These two literary forebears offer differing versions of identity. The play presents multiple voices but with sustained consistent characters and an omniscient narrator inviting us into the dreams of sleepers, whereas the poem is a gesture not of specific personalities, but of personality as tonality. The register and tone shift from line to line, producing a multi-vocal collage that almost dares you to take the personal pronouns as a coherent presence. Anything a “self” says is all the time an echo of earlier written texts, overheard pub chatter, domestic dialogues and interior monologues. Eliot doesn’t avoid instances of individuality per se, he just sees it as drawn from the thrum of an interactive linguistic pool. And he presents it as such. For the Modernist Eliot, the self is really a modality of language, a context.
Despite Eliot’s work predating Thomas’s, it is Eliot’s that is doing the work of adjusting language to a new way of comprehending selfhood. Obviously both works are complex and I know I can’t avoid the accusation of being reductive, but I use them to show how multi-vocalization can be changed to signify a new way of understanding identity. Thomas’s is heartening, charming, and reassuringly knowing, whereas Eliot’s multi-vocal text begins to accept something of the strange shapes of unsettling thoughts occurring in Physics and Psychology and Philosophy during the early part of the 20th century. The Waste Land can be seen as a landmark articulation of the anxiety of an emerging destabilization of Newtonian certainty, a rejection of the Enlightenment in the wake of catastrophic human failures and the acceptance of collaging as a replacement for the fallacy of coherent narratives. For many readers, accepting as real the challenges of Modernism is still a work in progress.
With its unorthodox use of Classical myth, its kaleidoscope of literary references and its ambitions to be a poem that takes on (or assiduously avoids) the great themes and the greatest poems of Western literature, it is Eliot’s The Waste Land that offers the clearest pre-cursor model of the ambitions and successes of Nobody[16].
*
[The poet] considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature…he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science…the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration.[17]
Wordsworth knew that Science was going to replace Religion as the most prodigious probe into the workings of the universe (it did). He also knew that Science might be a hard sell (it is), and that poets would not be moribund (whatever most people and most poets currently believe!), or sidelined, but would be essential allies in illuminating new arenas of knowledge. Poets will be called to speak new truths.
If Eliot’s poem of crisis incorporates unsettling contemporaneous theories in 1922, what work is Oswald’s Nobody doing for our generation a century later?
Nobody admits no interest in the subject directly, but something about Oswald’s willingness to see the self as a phenomenon of reflection and observation, and of her seeing the sea as object and subject mirroring the self, brings to mind ideas drawn from Quantum physics. Ideas that even physicists have trouble articulating.
When the Odyssey was compiled, it held and presented various truths (such as the need for hospitality and sacrificial protocol) that are not heralded in Dante. Dante’s vision of the universe is a complicated model of Christian divinity. Wordsworth’s is a language written from the ground up, mindful of a democratic revolution that holds each individual a worthy mirror to creation (Blake’s is even more radical). Eliot, cognizant of all these literary forebears begins to show cracks in a unified system of faith (he himself turned towards an Anglicanism that the Waste Land does not describe, but that Four Quartets might support. Great as it is, the knowledge put forward by Four Quartets is not revolutionary but conciliatory)[18].
The difference for Oswald is that even a cursory knowledge of quantum physics reveals that classical physics does not describe the nature of reality at all. Newtonian models are still functionally valuable, just are normative noun/verb relations are functional in language, but we begin to see that a person is not a solid noun, and even a modest event might take on significance and influence beyond its apparent context and adopted narrative.
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon by which two distant objects exhibit connection. The fascinating and weird truth of entanglement is that the relationship between entangled objects is not contained in either object (this can be experimentally proven), but in their relation. What entanglement also shows is that two entangled objects present unique information to unique observers. As Carlo Rovelli puts it “Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three”[19]. We might here find a strange resonance with the value of the poet on his stony island. Odysseus and Agamemnon are not unique isolated objects. They exist only in observation, and the chief observer is the poet. The poet of course does not exist without phenomenon to observe.[20]
The truth of entanglement unsettles any determination of any object’s properties before they are observed. And it also means that the observer is determined in the instant of observing. Vital and ephemeral. But this is not a weird observation limited to rarefied laboratory testing. This is how properties are manifest. All properties are relative properties. Any property of an object depends upon another object having that “information.” The role of relation is not just a secondary manifestation of observation, it is the foundational manifestation. What this strange truth unveils is a fundamental shift in our understanding of how important relation is in the manifestation of the universe. In the language of Oswald’s Nobody, what becomes significant is the nature of “between.”
I’m not really arguing that Nobody is a manifesto of Quantum Physics, just that it might model some aspects of the theory. As Rovelli suggests “I think it is time to take this theory fully on board, for its nature to be discussed beyond the restricted circles of theoretical physicists and philosophers, to deposit its distilled honey, sweet and intoxicating, into the whole of contemporary culture.”[21] In order to do this we must reimagine the very basics of how we write and see; “Sometimes we put into question the very conceptual grammar of our way of conceiving the world. We update our deepest image of the world.”[22]
What Rovelli asks (and Wordsworth expects of the poet) is perhaps what Oswald is trying to do. The validity of poetry is assured as long as humanity requires metaphors for the ongoing expression of being and for the developments in culture and society. Poetry might not have the apparently central role it had during Homer’s composition of the Odyssey, where it contained all myth and knowledge, where it was the central document holding together society, but the need to give articulation to the complexities of human experience has not diminished, and it might be that rather than sit in the centre of the group, the poet must dissolve and move between; instead of being a central somebody, she must become the vital nobody.[23]
Coda:
But perhaps with all this said I have mischaracterized the book, the poem, and the poet. It is a love story—surreptitious, fragmentary and honest[24]. Whether she is Clytemnestra avoiding discovery, a gannet diving after mackerel, or a poet enthralled by language, eyes and wings plunge into the next act. The poetry here isn’t merely astute or subject to a single theme, it is modest and visionary, precise and encompassing, oracular at times and always right on the cusp of forces meeting body and imagination—folding and unfolding, hiding and revealing. Its subject is poetry, and the sea, itself and the always-other, and the way both of these are massive and particular. It is written from the point of view of a body that swims in the sea and a mind that finds itself swimming in Homer. Although in clear conversation with “Major” poetry, there is a sense that Nobody eschews such a category, offering instead a dazzling and discreet performance that questions such values and identifications (the book cover itself offering the most understated of self-appraisals in the juxtaposition of the author name and the title: Alice Oswald/Nobody).
What makes Nobody so unique and of wider cultural value than some poetic experiments is that it manages to be so strange whilst being so recognizably well-done. There are many poets who write well, and many poets who dare to experiment, but very few that succeed at both to this degree. Its strangeness is not a try-on, and neither is the care of its writing. It is as virtuosic as it is deeply questioning, and the swim and swirl of its details are as much about its brushstrokes as they are about the objects depicted. Or nearly depicted, because really it’s a collage of finely painted backgrounds that you almost recognize from behind the heads of famous portraits and between the figures of historical scenes; the luminescent palette of Turner, the electrically-charged Tintoretto, and the sombre hued Titian mix classical technique with a contemporary composition. Many readers (and art lovers) privilege realism over abstraction. But the real changes and so do we. Quantum physics was not a contributing factor during the composition of the Odyssey, but it is for readers and poets today. Great artists aren’t just great technicians, they must also reflect the realities of their moment, however provisional.
Notes:
[1] Oswald, Alice. Nobody Jonathan Cape, London UK 2019 (p vii)
[2] Ibid p vii
[3] Ibid p 1
[4] Ibid p 48
[5] Ibid 40
[6] Ibid p 13
[7] The seemingly endlessness of The Odyssey can be folded into our understanding here. The ending that has come down to us is so unsatisfactory as to have been considered an addition, and book’s influence, our reading and rereading of it, make it actually endless. How many different people have read it, how many have seen the ocean?
[8] Ibid p 54
[9] Pound, Ezra. The Cantos https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54314/canto-i
[10] Ibid p 14
[11] Ibid p 36
[12] Ibid 14
[13] Ibid 52
[14] Whether or not Homer ever existed is much contested, and it’s fair to say that Homer is very likely nobody as well.
[15] Oswald, Alice A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Faber and Faber, London 2009 p.1
[16] There are of course contemporary poets with much in common with Oswald. One thinks of Anne Carson’s reworking of Classical works for a contemporary audience, and of Alice Notley’s radical revisions of Virgil.
[17] Preface to the Lyrical Ballads https://web.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/Courses/Spring2001/040/preface1802.html
[18] It’s worth noting that along with the Homeric figure of Tiresias (and plenty of Dante) in The Waste Land, the other central text for Modernism, Ulysses, makes obvious it’s debt to Homer.
[19] Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland, Riverhead Books, NYC 2021, pg 97. Here I also acknowledge that my Nobody is not the same as your Nobody, and the fact that I was reading Rovelli just before writing this is clearly an elemental influence on who the “I” is here.
[20] One aspect of Nobody I found unresolved was the odd focus on the infidelity of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Do they believe that in sending the poet away they will avoid detection, or is it more profound? Is sending the observer away tantamount to it not having happened? Why is this flawed relationship so important to Nobody’s vision?
[21] Ibid, p 199
[22] Ibid, p 197
[23] Implications for a poetics invested in the truth of Quantum Physics need not appear esoteric, consider for example how the notion of coming into being only in relation might affect social and political metaphors?
[24] There is only one moment for me when the rhetoric seems to overplay its hand: “The wind at night/incriminates the waves” (p.40) feels a little overwrought.
Martin Corless-Smith's most recent books are The Melancholy of Anatomy (Shearsman Books, UK, 2021) and The Ongoing Mystery of the Disappearing Self (SplitLevel Texts 2021).